Mexico invited to join trade talks as Canada waits in the wings

Mexico has a seat at the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks, but a press release from the U.S. trade representative announcing the invitation for Mexico to join is silent on when and if Canada will also be welcomed on board.

“We are delighted to invite Mexico, our neighbor and second largest export market, to join the TPP negotiations,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in the release Monday.

Mexico now joins a list of nine other nations taking part in the talks, including the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Canada has been looking to join the talks since the November’s APEC meeting in Honolulu, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s formal expression of Canada’s interest to join the talks coincided with an emphasis on shifting Canada’s trade focus to Asia in the wake of Barack Obama blocking the Keystone XL’s progress south of the border.

However, Canada’s access to the trade pact has been held back primarily by not just Washington’s, but also New Zealand’s objection to Canada’s supply management systems for dairy and poultry.

Playing it cool

For weeks now, rumours have been rife that both Canada and its fellow NAFTA partner Mexico might get invited to join at the G20 leaders summit, which wraps up Tuesday in Los Cabos.

If that’s the case, however, the Prime Minister’s director of communications wasn’t letting on at the G20 media briefing last Thursday.

“In terms of an announcement, I won’t speculate – this is a thing for the TPP members to invite other people to the table,” he said.

He sounded a lot like trade minister Ed Fast the week before, after a meeting of TPP ministers on the sidelines of APEC in Russia.

“I think it would be pure speculation to suggest that there’s a specific date or event at which that will be taking place.”

Late to the show

After initially showing little interest in Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Harper government has been progressively allocating resources to the file since changing its mind in Hawaii.

But the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade couldn’t confirm the exact number of civil servants involved, or how that number compared to other agreements such as the Canada-EU CETA, Canada-India or Canada-South Korea.

“The total number of full-time employees working on a specific negotiation is difficult to estimate. The intensity of the negotiating schedule depends on the stage of the negotiations and the capacity for engagement of each negotiating partner,” DFAIT spokesperson Caitlin Workman wrote in an e-mail to iPolitics.

Part of the head-counting problem, she added, stems from the fact that other agencies and departments generally account for one third of all those involved.

While the Harper government has been coy about whether an invite would come in Los Cabos, their play-it-cool approach has been at odds with both civil servants plugging away in the nation’s capital and the behind the scenes negotiating of Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright.

The Globe and Mail reported last week that Wright was pressing Washington to allow Canada to join and that “Canadian business source” believed the efforts could translate into an invitation to join as early as this week.

With all the resources his government has put into it thus far, and today’s announcement of the Mexico invitation, Prime Minister Harper will surely be wary of coming home empty-handed.